Author: Andrew Wheeler

Hellboy’s Buddies: Three volumes of Abe Sapien and one of a B.P.R.D. Vampire

This will be a bad review — not a negative one, since I enjoyed these books, and like the endlessly proliferating world of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy universe. No, this will be a poorly informed review, quick and slapdash and lazy, written more than two months after reading the books. But I’ve done a lot of them over the years — hey, I’m not getting paid here, so you get what you get — so I think I have a facility for doing quick superficial reviews that only mildly suck.

(And, if you really care what I think about the Hellboy universe, you can check out older posts on Hellboy in Hell , The Storm and the Fury , Being Human , Witchfinder , The Wild Hunt , The Midnight Circus ,  The Devil Does Not Jest , The Crooked Man , Lobster Johnson 3 and 4 , Hell on Earth 1-3 , Hell on Earth 4-10 , The Burning Hand , 1947 , 1948 , War on Frogs , and even further back from those if you follow some internal links.)

Abe Sapien: Dark and Terrible and the New Race of Man
Abe Sapien: The Shape of Things to Come
Abe Sapien: Sacred Places
(written by Mignola and Scott Allie, with one bit co-written by Mignola with John Arcudi; art by one or both of Sebastian Fiumara and Max Fiumara; colors by Dave Stewart)

These three volumes reprint the first year and a half (roughly) of the ongoing Abe Sapien comic, spinning off from B.P.R.D. when Abe himself cut loose from that joint, in the wake of another transformation and driven by a niggling worry that he might be an Apocalypse Beast himself. (For a different apocalypse than Hellboy himself, but this universe is well-stocked with potential and actual apocalypses to choose from.)

And they remind me of nothing so much as ’70s Hulk comics: the mysterious stranger with dangerous powers wanders across the Southwest, encountering both good people and monsters. Admittedly, the landscape Abe encounters is vastly changed: the Frog War might have been “won,” more or less, but there are massive alien monsters scattered around the world, entire cities have been destroyed, and normal life is basically over.

(Parenthetically, I’ll repeat again what I said in my review of the last clutch of B.P.R.D. stories: Mignola and his collaborators here are writing stories set after industrial civilization has collapsed, but they don’t quite seem to realize that. There’s no way any contemporary supply chains are still operating, and I’d estimate several billion people have already died — or been transformed into monsters — by this point. Just getting enough food to eat should be the primary worry of everyone in this world; not getting eaten by a monster is now a luxury.)

Meanwhile — because it wouldn’t be the Hellboy universe without subplots — a mostly dead B.P.R.D. agent has been brought back by a necromancer with a fiendish plot that we don’t entirely understand yet. And the B.P.R.D. is chasing Abe in a way that alternates between friendly and not-so-much.

And along the way a bunch of people die, and so do a bunch of monsters. This is a nastier world than the pre-apocalypse status quo, even if there does seem to be a somewhat functional government and occasional new consumer goods when there really shouldn’t be. Abe is mostly moping through all of this, worried that he is an Apocalypse Beast but pretty sure he isn’t, but still wanting to figure out how he fits into this world and what he should be doing.

It’s an interesting storyline, running somewhere through the territory between horror and superheroes: Abe is strong and knowledgeable, but he and his friends have already failed to stop the end of the world. Even if I do think these series must eventually show the extinction of the last humans on earth, there’s plenty of time and narrative space until that point.

B.P.R.D.: Vampire
(written by Mignola, Gabriel Ba, and Fabio Moon; art by Ba and Moon; colors by Stewart)


And this standalone story is a loose sequel to the 1946-1948 stories, focusing on one B.P.R.D. agent who was transformed into something more than human — and no prizes for guessing what.

I don’t think all of the middle has been filled in — this book covers a short time in the late ’40s, and that agent I don’t believe has showed up in any B.P.R.D. stories set any later in time than that — so I suspect this is Mignola throwing a ball up into the air and expecting to catch it much later, in some future B.P.R.D. story. (Or maybe there will be a direct sequel, which will end his story; it could go either way.)

So: moody, expressive art from Ba and Moon. Somewhat less dialogue than usual for a B.P.R.D. story, but still plenty of exposition. A conflicted hero and a mass of nasties. (I seem to be channeling Joe Bob Briggs here. I think there are a few breasts, actually. And plenty of blood.) This is a stylish, smart piece of a much larger story that pretty much stands on its own — if you want to sample Mignola without diving headfirst into the tangled mythology, this would be a very good choice.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

The Back Half of Scary Go Round by John Allison

John Allison has spent most of the past twenty years chronicling an ever-proliferating series of strange events in and around the small British town of Tackleford, somewhere in darkest Yorkshire. More impressively, he’s done all of this in public, on the Internet, most days of the week, for free. And he’s done it in comics form.

First up was Bobbins , which I haven’t made a serious study of yet, but was in the traditional newspaper strip-comic format and focused on the staff of Tackleford’s City Lights magazine, with perhaps some supernatural eruptions. After Allison closed that down around the turn of the millennium, he launched a new series with a somewhat overlapping cast of characters called Scary Go Round , which itself ended in 2009. SGR was formatted like a comics page, which made it easier to collect in book form and (possibly) allowed Allison to write more complex stories and include more of his quirky humor and details in each update. It also was clearly fantasy: characters visited Hell, were turned into zombies, and battled giant monsters to save the world. (Though Allison’s offhand tone and character-based plotting turned all of those elements into something very different from what you’d expect.) That strip was entirely collected into eight volumes, though — in the way of the webcomic — it’s also still all available online, as are Allison’s other strips.

For the next round of stories, Allison switched format again, to a double-tier newspaper style, which gave him a similar number of panels per page to SGR but with a more compact feel. That strip was called Bad Machinery , and it followed up the end of SGR to focus on two “teams” of tweens at the local school, who solve mysteries in competition with each other. Allison still includes supernatural elements, but they tend to be more subdued in Machinery than they were in SGR, making his stories better controlled and more focused on characters. He also clearly designed Machinery for eventual book publication, with long story arcs that each fit cleanly into a single book. (See my reviews of the three Machinery books to date: one , two , and three .)

Allison has also made a number of related print comics in various formats over the years — including Expecting to Fly , which appeared online first — and there’s a 2013-2015 run of Bobbins , just to confuse things even more. Since Machinery in its turn ended last year, he produced a transitional story called “Space Is the Place ” (with part of the Machinery cast going to a space camp in Wales). And he’s also been writing a monthly comic called Giant Days — confusingly, this is also the title of a major SGR storyline, plus an earlier sidebar print project — for a different art team, which may or may not have a Tackleford connection. (I haven’t seen it yet, since it’s only in floppy form so far.)

So Tackleford is a place that Allison knows well, and has been telling stories about in a variety of ways for a long time. It’s his Yoknapatawpha County or Castle Rock — the core of a world that extends out to many places. With that said, though, Machinery feels more focused on Tackleford than SGR did — maybe because the main characters of Machinery were kids, and limited in their ability to go other places and do other things.

I’ve been a fan of Machinery for a while, but only recently started diving back into Allison’s archives. The first four SGR collections are currently unavailable to most readers in book form — I believe ebooks are still obtainable in the UK, but not elsewhere due to a stupid recent tax law in that backwards country — but books five through eight are still out there, most easily obtainable in the US from Topatco . And so that’s how I got those books — Great Aches, Ahoy Hoy!, Peloton, and Recklessly Yours — and finally read a big wodge of SGR for myself.

What strikes me most about this slightly-less-formed version of Allison’s world is how consistent he’s been in his concerns: his stories have focused on smart, sarcastic women with a goal in mind — Shelley Winters as the exemplar for SGR, Charlotte Grote for Machinery, with plenty of others including Amy Chilton and Dark Esther — in a world of slightly slower, bemused men who end up along for the ride.

Unlike the Machinery books, each SGR volume collects a number of stories, adding up to about eleven months for each book. (More or less, to allow for full stories in each one.) Allison also includes notes on each storyline and some sketches and similar material at the end of each book, in the old way to entice freebie online readers to actually pay money for something.

These books, covering the strips from early 2006 through the end in late 2009, show serious growth in Allison’s art style, from a cleaner version of the look he began SGR with in 2002, drawn on a computer, through a hand-drawn middle period and a brief “hand-drawn, but much bigger originals” period before settling back onto the computer. (Where I think he’s stayed ever since.) The first story of Great Aches is in that early, flat-computer-color style, but everything else has a energetic hand-drawn look which well suites Allison’s frenetic characters and zigzag pacing.

The stories are a bit sillier and more anarchic than Machinery, and Allison’s notes make it clear that he spent this period making it up as he went along, diving into long stories without necessarily having a clear idea of how he’d get to the end. But even if the stories are somewhat shaggier and less formed, they’re still Allison stories, with unlikely turns of plot and deflation always waiting in the wings. And his dialogue was whip-smart from well before this period, full of witty asides and great cross-talk that always feels plausible enough while still not conforming to the way real people ever did or would talk. (That is a good thing: people talk badly almost all of the time. Fiction is to make things better and more interesting.)

So, in conclusion: John Allison is awesome. Buy his books, read his comics, enrich him with your dollars and pounds and more exotic currencies. Start here, start with Bad Machinery, go crazy and drop all the way back to the beginning of Bobbins in 1998 to get the full John Allison experience from the beginning. It’s all good. 

Note: I’m not including the usual Amazon links this time, because that’s a very bad way to read and/or buy Allison’s older work. You can get the Bad Machinery books there if you want, but the others are available other places more easily. And, honestly, for a webcomic you should just read a bunch of it online first — surely we understand that by now?

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Comics Round Up: June 2015

These books each deserve their own posts, but it doesn’t look like they’re going to get it. But here’s the deal I have for them: if I write more than three solid paragraphs about any one of them — and that does happen; I’m never sure how long my fingers are going to keep moving — that book will get broken out and become its own post. (So it’s entirely possible no one but me will ever read this introductory paragraph; that’s happened before with planned round-ups.)

Sam Zabel And The Magic Pen

by Dylan Horrocks

Autobio comics can be fun, but they can only go so far. Comics are such a time-consuming discipline, with so many hours spent hunched over a drawing board, that creators who rely on that mode either disappear up the navel of anatomizing their own process or misrepresent the few bits of their lives spent doing other things. Some creators, though, take “themselves” — or some version of their selves and lives — and throw that into something deeply unreal. And that can be much more satisfying.

This new graphic novel from New Zealander Horrocks — best known in artsy comics circles for his book Hicksville , best known in the CBR world for writing Batgirl for a while — is not about “Dylan Horrocks.” As you can easily see from the title, the hero is named Sam Zabel. And the Big Two superheroine he writes is Lady Night, a mystic hero in the Dr. Fate mode. And the fantasy world he falls into is, I have to assume, not something that comes directly out of Horrocks’s experience.

Though that would be pretty cool, if it did.

Any story about a creator becomes a story about creation: about making stories and being blocked and finding inspiration and working despite obstacles and the wellsprings of story and all of that jazz. Horrocks does a good version of that story here, but you’re not likely to be greatly surprised at the twists of the story or the places it goes. Stories about stories are a minor genre these days, and this is a pretty good one. (You can still read a version of it — I think it was somewhat updated and altered for book publication — on Horrock’s site.) And if telling this story re-energized Horrocks so he can tell more stories, and maybe even stories (unlike this and Hickville) that aren’t about how comics are special and cool and the greatest artform in the history of the universe while at the exact same time a pitiless industry that eats its young….well, that would also be pretty cool.

Sin Titulo

by Cameron Stewart

This is another fantasy story, with some elements in common with Sam Zabel — though not the connection to creative people or comics — but I probably shouldn’t emphasize that part, since those are the secrets that come out later in what’s mostly a mystery plot. And it also originally appeared for free online, though its URL leads to a blank page. (You can google it yourself, if you like: I see no reason to link to nothingness.)

So a young man goes to visit his grandfather in a nursing home and is shocked to learn the old man died a month before. A noir plot then start up: a photo of the grandfather with a beautiful young woman suggests depths, then disappears; a thuggish orderly is abusing patients and has darker secrets; the young man gets obsessed and starts neglecting his job and girlfriend. But there are also prophetic dreams, of trees and beaches, and the solution to this mystery will not be mundane.

Sin Titulo is a strong story, that turns naturally from realism into fantasy and uses its noir elements — not just plot; the layout and drawing style evoke classic strip comics and the dark alleys of old movies — with assurance and ability.

No Matter How I Look at It, It’s You Guys’ Fault I’m Not Popular!, Vols. 6 & 7

by Nico Tanigawa

Every series falls into ruts; every comedy finds that its running jokes stop running quite so well. I’m not saying that’s definitely what’s happened to this manga series, since I could have had an off day while reading these, or maybe these stories just didn’t connect with me the way I hoped they would. But I am feeling that WataMote (the fan-name for the series, from the first two words of the Japanese title) is thinning out a bit, and not as exciting to me as it was before.

(Speaking of before, can I point you to my reviews of volumes 1 and 2 , 3 , 4 , and 5 ?)

I don’t have much more to say about these volumes: I found parts of them funny, but more opaque. It may be because this clump of story got into more Japanese-specific moments that they didn’t connect with me, or maybe Tomoko’s schtik is wearing on me. Either way: this was still fun, and I’ll come back for another volume or two (which should see Tomoko to her graduation), but maybe not any more than that. It could be that the first few volumes are the best: that’s not uncommon. And those stories still exist, and are still as good as ever.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Review: “The Book of Human Insects” by Osamu Tezuka

Some writers love their characters, and can hardly bear to have anything bad happen to them. Osamu Tezuka, though, is not one of them: particularly in his books for adults, like MW, Ayako, Ode to Kirihito, and Apollo’s Song, he creates profoundly damaged — and damaging — characters, and then sets them up to bounce off each other like frenzied fighting cocks until he’s satisfied.

[[[The Book of Human Insects]]] is another work in that vein, though even more so — its main character is a cuckoo of a woman, who “steals” the creative abilities of every person she comes into contact with, doing what they do just a bit better and more impressive and leaving them wrung out and ruined when she moves on. It’s from that period in Tezuka’s career when he was focusing on comics like this — it was serialized in Play Comic during 1970 and 71, at roughly the same time as Ode and Apollo. And, to be honest, the people that Toshiko Tomura (or any of her many other names) steals from aren’t much better than she is — they’re certainly not innocent, or anything more than slightly better than she is.

Tomura has just won a major literary award with her first book as Human Insects opens — but, as we come to see, that means it’s time for her to move on, since she can only have one great achievement in any field. (Since they’re not her achievements, really, except in that she takes them and makes them hers.) Human Insects follows Tomura as she stalks forward into new territory, and we also slowly discover the people — men, primarily; this is a story from the early ’70s and could be read as a curdled take on a certain kind of feminism — that she’s already met, seduced, co-opted, and abandoned already.

A Western story of the same era would probably spend a long time psychologizing about Tomura, explaining why she is the way she is, with references to her childhood traumas and whatnot. Tezuka, coming out of a different tradition, just presents Tomura: we see some hints of her past, and she clearly doesn’t have a healthy relationship with that, but there’s none of the deadening “now I’ll explain everything to you” that an American would have felt compelled to include in 1970. Tomura is nasty and manipulative and utterly self-centered: that’s just who she is. And, because that’s who she is, she will win, even when faced with men more powerful and seemingly as ruthless as she is.

Human Insects is not the most pleasant read, in common with Tezuka’s other books of this era: in a world full of scoundrels and bastards, there is only nastiness and back-stabbing. And Human Instincts doesn’t have the supernatural majesty of Ode to Kirihito or the epic family-saga sweep of Ayako (or the pure feral energy of MW), so it’s pleasures are at a more human scale, and driven by schadenfreude and bemused head-shaking. These are nasty people doing nasty things, but we recognize them all: Tezuka makes them all very real nasty people, doing exaggerated, large-scale versions of the kind of petty slights we see every day. Human Insects is a misanthropic book, as you’d expect from the title, but not an unconvincing one.

Review: “Costume Not Included” by Matthew Hughes

It’s not easy being a superhero in the best of circumstances, so pity the poor man whose powers derive from a demon — and whose mother is dating one of the nation’s leading evangelical preachers. And when that young unfortunate’s name is Chesney Arnstruther, well…that’s someone whom you would not want to switch places with.

Chesney is the superhero of Costume Not Included, second novel in a trilogy called “To Hell and Back” — though it means that more puckishly than most fantasy books would — and I’ll direct you to my review of the first novel, The Damned Busters, for the precise details of how and why Chesney made that deal with the devil, how he did it without forfeiting his immortal soul, and why an actuary wanted to be a musclebound superhero in the first place.

There are two kinds of trilogy-middles: the ones that lose the energy of the first volume and mark time until the finale, and the ones that are happy to have gotten the scene-setting out of the way and leap into creating ever more complications to keep things interesting. Costume, luckily, is of the second type: the first book took a little while to get going, but this one hits its wry tone right up front and charges forward at exactly the right pace.

Really, how could you put down a novel that begins like this:

“I thought you weren’t speaking to me,” Chesney Arnstruther said into the phone.

“I’m not speaking to you,” said his mother. “I’m telling you something for your own good, is what I’m doing.”

I’ve spent the last several years haranguing anyone who wanders into Antick Musings about how essentially funny and entertaining a writer Matthew Hughes is — see my other reviews of Hughes books, all of which you should buy, read, and love, in approximately that order: The Other, Hespira, Template, The Spiral Labyrinth, and Majestrum — so I’ll leave that part as read: Hughes came into the SFF field writing Vance-inspired far-future books, but his influences were always deeper than Vance (not that being able to write as smoothly and sardonically as the great Jack Vance isn’t a monumental achievement to begin with), and he’s since shown that his essential qualities shine through in a variety of subgenres.

So, anyway: Chesney is a superhero, and he’s been doing well at it. Too well, actually: he’s wiped out pretty much all of the Golden Age-style street crime (guys in suits and fedoras robbing banks, muggings, and so forth) in his city, and his deal only extends so far. He can’t directly stop the sources of crime — which, in best superhero fashion, lies with a shadowy cabal that secretly runs that city — and his put-everything-into-the-right-boxes mind is not happy leaving a job undone. (His new girlfriend, Melda, is also pushing him in slightly different directions; she’s like to see him have a higher media profile and perhaps make some money from being the Actionary.)

Adding to the complications is that his mother’s new boyfriend — that noted thriller writer turned TV evangelist, Reverend Hardacre — has his own new, and very odd, theory about the secret cosmology of the world, and it’s becoming more and more clear that Hardacre is right. And the Devil is not entirely happy with the deal with Chesney — that lack of a soul coming his way vexes him, and the Devil’s whole raison d’etre is to trick and twist and sneak — and the Devil has deal with other folks who may help him cause trouble for Chesney.

So complications — very idiosyncratic, unique complications, of the kind only Hughes could create — proliferate, until Cheney finds himself chased closely by a smart police detective, meeting a Jesus Christ, (not the Jesus — not the current one, at least — but a prior, historical version) and having himself proclaimed as a new prophet by Hardacre. But Chesney still has Melda, and his demon Xaphan, on his side, plus his own inextinguishable drive for truth and justice. And there’s still one book to come in this trilogy.

Not to sound like a broken record, but Matt Hughes is a great, wonderfully entertaining writer — his dialogue pops, his people are quirky and real, and his situations could be written by no one else in the world. If you don’t like his work, there’s got to be something wrong with you.

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Review: “After the Golden Age” by Carrie Vaughn

Carrie Vaughn is best-known for her “Kitty Norville” urban fantasy series — about a radio talk-show host turned reluctant werewolf — but she’s also written other things. Just last year, for instance, she came out with [[[After the Golden Age]]], a superhero novel about Celia West, the completely unpowered accountant daughter of the two most popular and powerful heroes of Commerce City.

So, the first question is: what comes after the Golden Age? Whether you’re Hesiod or Jack Kirby, the obvious answer is “The Silver Age.” And After the Golden Age is a quite Silver Age-y book, full of gangsters (organized into teams, with spiffy nicknames, and I would not be at all surprised if many of their gangs had dress codes) who politely kidnap Celia repeatedly in the vain hope of using her as a shield against her parents. (This is seen to never work, but — in best Silver Age fashion — the gangsters keep doing it, because they need to follow the essential Weisinger plots or else they are nothing.)

This is lucky for Celia; if this were an Iron Age story, she’d be in pieces in the fridge before page ten, and we wouldn’t have much of a novel. But she does live in a more genteel age, with defined standards of behavior for both heroes and villains, and so her kidnappings tend to just disrupt her schedule and horribly frustrate her.

(Vaughn lampshades the inevitable question: Celia doesn’t leave Commerce City because she doesn’t want to — sure, she has no relationship with her parents, and has a career that usually takes young public accountants through extensive travel around the country for the first few years of their careers, but, by gum! she’s going to stay right there in Commerce City because the plot requires it no villains will drive her out!)

The rest of the book is agreeably muddle-headedly Silver-Agean like that: Celia starts dating a young police detective, Mark Paulson, whose father is the city’s Mayor, with the usual obvious parallels between their parents. Celia’s ur-kidnapping was by the Olympiad’s (her parents’ superteam) greatest foe, the Destructor, as a young teen, and she ran away to join the Destructor’s gang not long afterward, in a fit of teenage pique at sixteen. (And this is endlessly brought back up throughout the novel, as though this was a superhero world in which no one had ever made a heel or face turn even once — let alone dozens of times a year, as in the modern era.) Celia is given primary responsibility to build a forensic accounting case against the Destructor (even though he’s old, possibly senile, and has been locked up in not-Arkham for a while now) as part of a major criminal case against him, for no obvious or specific crimes, and even though her multiple conflicts of interest would make any opposing counsel salivate at the thought. The whole plot, in fact, is entirely second-hand: it’s all standard superhero furniture that seems to be in this novel because it belongs somewhere in a superhero story, and not because Vaughn had specific reasons for wanting any of it.

Vaughn keeps it all going with her narrative voice, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if you spend any time thinking about it. But, remember: in the Silver Age, stories aren’t supposed to make sense. Celia has more than the recommended level of angst, and is batted around by events — she’s supposedly driven and responsible, but her accountancy work isn’t dramatic, so Vaughn just mentions it now and then, and it really doesn’t add up to much.

Celia bounces off the supers of her hometown — her parents, Captain Olympus and Spark; Arthur Mentis, the telepath who was a late addition to their team; Annalise, aka Typhoon, a water-powered hero her age — as she slowly learns about the requisite sinister plot. And, of course, she gets kidnapped in the furtherance of that plot, but it all turns out all right in the end — city saved, true love found, the whole nine yards.

After the Golden Age is a pleasant if slightly musty-feeling superhero story; it’s based on several-decade-old tropes and doesn’t bear a whole lot of resemblance to what superhero stories look like these days. (Of course, superhero stories have looked horrible for much of the last two decades, so not looking like that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.) Vaughn makes it entirely an enjoyable read, but this isn’t a book to think too deeply about motivation or realism as you’re running through the pages.

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Review: “Lust” by Ellen Forney

Like many papers, Seattle’s weekly — I think I’m supposed to say “alternative weekly,” though there’s no established industry of stodgy weeklies for those alt-weeklies to be the alternative to — The Stranger has personal ads, in which its lovelorn or just horny readers try to find each other for mutually beneficial activities. Unlike other papers, though, The Stranger has Ellen Forney (cartoonist and teacher of cartooning, author of Monkey Food, which I just realized I read and reviewed a couple of years back) illustrating one of those ads — from the LustLab section, where strangers anatomize in explicit detail their sexual needs and wants to find just the perfect kinky partner — every week.

Lust collects a whole bunch of those ads, along with five interviews that Forney did with some ad-writers. And I will warn you: a number of the ads and folks in here are certainly kinkier than you are, no matter how kinky you are — kink isn’t a linear spectrum, and there are folks here off in various directions, seeking their very particular nirvana. Assuming you can handle the idea of other people having sex in ways you don’t think you would enjoy, Lust is cute and fun — each of Forney’s illustrations is like a little advertisement or calling card (like those cards that used to paper London) for that person’s desires, with a clean, illustrative style that varies a lot for the different pieces.

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Stating the Obvious

  • News
  • August 28, 2012

Cover of "The Hunger Games"

This story is a week old, but I neglected to mention it when it hit: Amazon declares that Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger Games” trilogy is the highest-selling series ever for them in the US.

This does not mean that Collins’s books have sold more copies overall than, for example, J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series, which was the prior record-holder. And it doesn’t mean any of the things implied in Sara Nelson’s self-lauding statement at the link.

What it means — and what everyone who works in publishing already knows, but doesn’t usually like to say in public — is that Amazon is capturing an ever-larger share of the book business, which means that they sell a larger percent of books now than they did ten years ago — so of course the big sellers now are bigger for Amazon than the big sellers were ten years ago. (Look for a similar statement about those “Fifty Shades of Grey” books in another year, especially if a movie does get made.)

This is good if you think that a single retailer should dominate the entire retail landscape for a particular kind of product. If you don’t think that’s such a good thing, your mileage may vary.

But what the statement really is saying is “we own the book market now, suckers.” So you might as well learn to love Big Brother.

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World Fantasy Award Nominees

  • News
  • August 28, 2012

English: George R.R. Martin signing books in a...

I am a bad SFnal blogger, since these nominees were announced a good two weeks ago. (Perhaps I delayed because I believe, based on my own WFA judge experience, that the winners in all categories have already been determined, and so most of the nominees are doomed to forlorn hopes.)

Anyway, congratulations to all of the nominees, and good luck to them. I leave the annual exercise of determining which two entries in each category were voted on by the convention membership and which were picked by the judges to fandom assembled.
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REVIEW: “Friends With Boys” by Faith Erin Hicks

REVIEW: “Friends With Boys” by Faith Erin Hicks

Friends with Boys, the new graphic novel by Faith Erin Hicks (whose The War at Ellsmere I reviewed in a huge round-up month), has an oddly ill-fitting title; it’s the story of a teenager, Maggie, who is starting in a public highschool after her mother (who home-schooled her and her three older brothers — all of whom oddly seem to still be in the same school though there seems to be a few years in between her and her twin brothers and then the oldest one) ran away mysteriously. Maggie has trouble making friends with anyone, since she’s been so wrapped up in her family, but she’s a tomboy, and has been closer to boys (her brothers) her entire life. So being “Friends With Boys” isn’t really the big thing here — it’s that she’s in the company of people who aren’t family, or without her mother, or something along those lines. The title also makes her homeschooling sound more controlling or sinister, as if it were based on some controlling-young-women religion, and it isn’t like that at all.

But there’s nothing to stop Maggie from becoming friends with boys, or more than that — her brothers are friendly and supportive (if awfully rough-and-tumble) rather than over-protective, and even her father (the chief of police of their small town) is a support rather than an authority figure. Friends With Boys is somewhat the story of potential friendships for Maggie, but those friendships are with a brother and sister (Lucy and Alistair) that she meets at school, her brothers (as they work out their own conflicts), and a ghost that she’s been seeing in the local graveyard for the past seven years.

The ghost and the Alistair/Lucy friendship together drive much of the plot — Alistair, a mohawked punk, has a feud with the blond captain of the volleyball team (though, luckily, it’s not otherwise as cliched as that may sound), and Maggie is sure she knows what she has to do to put that ghost at rest. But, if Hicks has a message in Friends With Boys, it’s that things are more complicated than they look. There are several plot or thematic strands that are raised but never resolved — primarily among them the disappearance of Maggie’s mother just before the book starts — and the answers we do learn aren’t the ones we expected.

All of that makes Friends With Boys an excellent graphic novel for teens, its expected audience — it’s a story about walking out into a wider world, not entirely understanding it, making plans based on what you see — and then still not entirely understanding that world. So much fiction for teens tries to wrap everything up in one ball or another — that everything is horrible because adults, or that they can be perfect special snowflakes if they want, or some other pat explanation — that Hicks’ messy complications (and that’s without any kind of love-plot, too; how complicated will Maggie’s life get what that gets into the mix?) are a breath of cool air, like the dizzying view from a mountaintop. As this book ends, Maggie still hasn’t learned how to be friends with boys, but maybe she has learned how to be friends with her brothers, which is one step forward.

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